An attempt by a woman described as “one of the leaders of the extreme right” to justify her support for Holocaust deniers and Iran has been condemned by anti-fascist commentators.

Lady Renouf, a close friend of David Irving, has written to the JC in response to an article by columnist David Toube two weeks ago. Mr Toube criticised Lady Renouf’s support for disgraced academic Nicholas Kollerstrom, dismissed in April as an honorary fellow of University College London for publishing a paper claiming the gas chambers of Auschwitz never existed.

Subsequently Lady Renouf, who took part in the infamous Holocaust revisionists’ conference in 2006 in Tehran, helped Dr Kollerstrom make an appearance on the Iran-backed Press TV, which also published his paper on its website. In her letter, Lady Renouf defends the right to claim that there was no scientific evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Gerry Gable, founder of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, said: “She is one of the leaders of the extreme right-wing. The claim in her letter that there is scientific evidence for this is rubbish. There is a mass of evidence to show the exact opposite and the strange thing is that much of it came from Germany. The one thing about the Nazis was that they were scrupulous in writing everything down.”

Mark Gardner, Community Security Trust director of communications, said: “This woman straddles both the pseudo-intellectual side of the right but also courts Iran and the Arabs. For her, anti-Zionism has become a far more central part of her character, more even than the right-wing side of it. That is where she starts from.”

In her letter, Lady Renouf, who befriended Irving during the libel action he lost against American academic Deborah Lipstadt, praises Iran as a “peace-loving country” where Jews were “not in any way” abused and claimed it had a freer press than the media in democratic countries.